Purchase orders are legal contracts between buyers and sellers, pursuant to which sellers supply goods and/or services to buyers, and in exchange thereof sellers receive payments from buyers. For example, an employee of a buyer may set up a purchase order in a computer 100 illustrated in FIG. 1A. Each purchase order (PO) may include multiple lines, such as line 1 for item 1000 and line 2 for item 1002 as shown in FIG. 1A. Each line of a PO holds information on a specific item being purchased by the buyer, such as a unique identifier of the item, a description of the item, a category of the item, and total quantity of the item to be purchased. When delivery of the item identified in a PO line is to be split among multiple locations and/or on multiple dates, the PO line includes the details of locations and dates in rows (called “schedules”, “delivery schedules” or “shipments”). For example, FIGS. 1B and 1C illustrate two rows with due dates of Dec. 18, 2013 and Dec. 19, 2013 which are included as two “schedules” of PO line 1 for item 1000 with item description “Biking Jersey” shown in FIG. 1A.
After some (typically all) goods and/or services specified in a purchase order have been delivered by the seller, buyer's employee may change the purchase order by generating a change order, by clicking on a “A” using a mouse as illustrated in FIG. 1C. To generate the change order, it may be necessary to manually gather certain information, such as the quantity of item 1000 received for line 1 being 4.0, as shown in a column with the header “*PO Qty” shown in FIG. 1D. Thus, a prior art buyer's employee may need to mentally remember such information, for use in input into another screen (not shown) to generate the change order. Some prior art change orders are described in, for example, US Patent Application Publication 2010/0211482 by Nambiar et al. published Aug. 19, 2010, entitled “Change Order Template For Purchase Order Document Amendment” which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, as background.
A status of “close” (or “final close”) of a purchase order indicates that the purchase order cannot be used for any further receiving or invoicing in future. Such “closing” (or “final closing”) of a purchase order is commonly performed by the buyer's employee after a match (or “final match”) between: (1) a purchase order, (2) a receipt indicating that goods and/or services were received as specified in the purchase order, and (3) an invoice (or debit note or voucher) for the amount, as specified in the purchase order. The just-described match between these three documents is also known in the prior art as a three-way match, e.g. as described in US Patent Application Publication 2005/0240524 by Van De Van et al. published Oct. 27, 2005, entitled “Method and Apparatus For Account Payable Matching For An Online Purchasing System” which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, as background.
When all PO lines in a purchase order are expected to have no more receiving, that purchase order may be closed. A closed PO can be re-opened, e.g. as described in US Patent Application Publication 2013/0282535 by Bhaowal et al. published Oct. 24, 2013, entitled “Reopening A Final Closed Purchase Order For Continuation Of Receipt and Invoice” which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, as background.
Depending on the nature of goods and/or services, certain purchase orders may be kept open, so that these open purchase orders can be used to match future receipts and/or invoices. For example, a purchase order for a copier may include a first line for the new copier itself, and a second line for toner to be repeatedly delivered in future. When the new copier is delivered and invoiced, the first line in the PO is typically closed (e.g. by performing the above-described three-way match thereon), while the second line in the PO is typically kept open. After passage of several years of normal use, the copier may break-down and get decommissioned, so that no toner is needed. At this stage, the second line can remain open in the purchase order, even though no toner is needed. Closing of the second line may become delayed indefinitely, e.g. if an employee responsible for decommissioning the copier (who may not even know about the purchase order) does not notify another employee responsible for the purchase order.
To address a situation of the type described in the preceding paragraph, a buyer may decide to modify the quantity of an item specified in a PO line, to prevent future receipt of that item. Such a modification can be made manually for each schedule in a PO line, although one prior art system called “PeopleSoft Enterprise Purchasing 9.1” allows a buyer to indicate that a PO line is to be “close short” processed, by clicking a button to select or deselect a “close short” check box. When the check box is checked for a PO line and when certain close short processing requirements are met, the system reduces the quantity specified on each schedule in the PO line, to a quantity that has been received (in situations where the item has been received on the schedule). If there has been no receiving yet, on a schedule in a PO line marked for close short processing, the system cancels that schedule (instead of reducing the quantity to zero). For more details on close short processing, see a book entitled “PeopleSoft Enterprise Purchasing 9.1 PeopleBook”, published on March 2011 by Oracle Corporation, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety as background.
The inventors of the current patent application believe that the above-described close short processing of PO lines is inflexible as only the received quantity is available for use in changing PO lines. Hence, the current inventors believe there is a need for apparatuses, methods and non-transitory computer-readable storage media of the type described below, to use one or more rules to modify one or more lines in purchase orders during close short processing, following which POs may be closed to terminate a buyer's legal obligation to accept goods and/or services from a seller.